Selling his sheep is hardly an option. Farmers across Australia are overwhelming livestock auctions with sheep and cattle at loss-making prices. Such is the crippling effect of the fifth straight year of drought that some farmers have begun shooting their animals.

For others, the plight has become even more desperate and every four days officials record the suicide of another farmer.

Even as bush fires rage in southern states and Sydney swelters under an early summer heat wave, the urban population has so far felt insulated from the rural crisis. But officials now say that food prices are set to rise because of plummeting production.

Some farmers are asking whether farming across vast tracts of Australia has been wiped out for good by global warming. Many take on second jobs to supplement their incomes and others are considering giving up their farms to work in booming mines.

John Howard, the Prime Minister, yesterday issued the latest emergency relief payments. The A$350 million (£142 million) relief package to farmers in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia and the Australian Capital Territory comes on top of the A$1.2 billion that the Government has spent on drought relief since 2001. Mr Howard, who in the past has dismissed as alarmist those blaming climate change, has now admitted a link with global warming.

The country’s most productive grain growing belt — southern Western Australia — is drying out faster than any other place on Earth. Certainly farmers such as John Cossar feel that they are at the sharp end of climate change.

“If you think this is scaring the bejesus out of the politicians, what do you think it’s doing to farmers?” said Mr Cossar, 39, whose farm in central Victoria has been in his family for more than a century.

“Everyone says it will turn around, but these dry years have been the norm for us for such a long time now that I have to start believing there is some [climate] change.”

Six years ago Robert Neate reared 5,000 sheep on his property in far western New South Wales. After five years of drought he has been forced to seek a job off the farm to support his wife and three children. “The worst thing is that you start to wonder if it’s ever going to rain again,” he said.

“It’s going to affect every dinner table over summer,” Ian Macdonald, the Minister for Agriculture for New South Wales, said.

“This is because for the first time in many generations we have a drought that’s virtually across the southern half of the continent.”

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